Doomsday
Clock Remains Close to Midnight

Brandon
Sun “Small World” Column, Monday, June 6 / 16Zack Gross

Last week, U.S. President Obama, in Japan for the G7 meetings,
took time to visit Hiroshima and speak to the Japanese people
about the nuclear bombing of that city and Nagasaki at the end
of the Second World War. In 1945, the atomic scientists
who worked on the Manhattan Project which produced those first
nuclear weapons, created the Doomsday
Clock, as they said that they could not ignore the
consequences of their work.

At the time, the Clock was used as a lobbying tool to press for
an end to the arms race and the threat of nuclear destruction of
the Earth. Since 1945, the clock has been moved back and
forth on an annual basis in relation to the fear this group of
scientists endure as the world has careened through a long Cold
War between Western allies and a Communist Empire which lasted
from the 40s through to 1990 and now what some call Cold War II
since Russia's invasion of Ukraine two years ago.

At the end of January of this year, the Bulletin of Atomic
Scientists, a highly respected publication, announced that the
clock would remain at three minutes to midnight as the threat of
war and of climate change remain high despite on-going efforts
such as a nuclear treaty with Iran and a climate accord in
Paris. The clock was first set at 11.57 pm the previous
January and remains the closest to midnight the sixteen Novel
Laureates have set it since 1983 at the height of the Cold War.

Global tensions around current migration from the Middle East to
Europe, on-going instability, terrorism and regional conflict in
Western Asia, and an impasse between Russia and the U.S. over
territorial expansion fuel the louder ticking of the Doomsday
Clock. But with greater understanding of our climate
challenges compared to the clock's inception 70 years ago, the
scientists have added global warming as a factor in setting the
Doomsday Deadline.

In their press release of late January of this year, the
Scientists pointed out that 2015 was again Earth's warmest year,
something that now occurs regularly. We are now on average
more than a degree Celsius warmer than we were in pre-industrial
times, which makes a seemingly small but actually devastating
difference to the planet. At no time in our history have
we dealt with extreme weather as we are now forced to – storms,
floods, droughts on a scale that were of-the-century, then
of-the-decade and now everyday happenings.

While the Atomic Scientists see glimmers of hope in Canada and
Australia re-engaging in climate discussions, they are
discouraged that the British government is headed in the
opposite direction, and that the U.S. Republican Party now
stands alone in failing to acknowledge that human-caused climate
change is even a problem. On the positive side, they
recognize the value of the Papal Encyclical on Climate Change
and the creation of new, greener technologies and investments by
the private sector.

Echoing the concerns of the architects of the new United
Nations Sustainable Development Goals announced at the
start of this year, when it comes to climate change, voluntary
and incremental measure just aren't enough! There needs to
be fundamental change to turn the tide of global warming.
Fear around U.S.-Russian relations and North Korean nuclear
initiatives lead the scientists to say that only a few bright
spots kept the clock from being moved even closer to midnight.

World leaders are called upon to dramatically reduce spending on
their nuclear weapons modernization programs (something many of
us don't know about!) and to follow up with action immediately
on the Paris Climate Accords. Say the keepers of the
Doomsday Clock: “The Clock Ticks. Global Danger
Looms. Wise Leaders Should Act Immediately.”Zack Gross is a former
Executive Director of Brandon’s The Marquis
Project.